Now with added detail!, Part 2

I'm calling this version the "photo quality isn't great, but the story behind it is" version. :-) For part one go here.

The above shot was taken in Prague. I'd met Danilo and Elin, two really cool couchsurfers, and we were all in great moods. If I remember correctly, it was a Friday night and we were ready for a night on the town. As we walked to the meeting place for the CS party that we were going to, I stopped in the middle of the street to take this picture. The light isn't great and the shot ends up looking a little fuzzy and out of focus. I like it, though, because with all the good mood vibes in the air and the excitement of a night out with cool people, I was feeling kind of warm, fuzzy, and out of focus myself.

See those colorful, swirly blobs? Yeah, those are koi fish and in case you didn't know, they are very hard to photograph. (Well, at least they're not running away from you like sheep do, but they're fast and taking pictures through water is hard to begin with.)

I took this shot in Bangkok; it was a jam-packed day of activity and this was taken at the Jim Thompson house. I seem to remember being in a good mood on this day, too, and was so dead set on getting a picture of the koi that I literally spent 30-45 minutes taking shot after shot, going for the perfect one. I never did get it (you can see my other attempts here, here, and here), but I sure had fun trying and I had a big, goofy grin on my face the whole time.

Finally for today, we go back to Muang Ngoi in Laos. You may recall that me and Laos didn't exactly get off on the right foot and it was all downhill from there (I won't link to it because, well, the word 'explosive' should be the only reminder you need). Then I got to Muang Ngoi and all was right with the world again. People were friendly, the vibe was laid-back, and I started to feel like myself again at last.

This shot is terrible because I'm zoomed in super far which doesn't really work so well for a point and shoot camera. I was trying to get a good shot of the moon - if you squint and have a good imagination, you can kind of see it in the top of the shot, towards the left. The rest of the photo is a view of the restaurant that was directly across from my bungalow. I spent most of my afternoons and early evenings in Muang Ngoi laying in the hammock on my porch, watching the night get darker and darker, as I listened to the chatter coming from the restaurant. The peacefulness of it all makes me smile even now.

I suppose this edition of the story behind the photo should have been called the "good moods and happy times" edition. ;-)

* * * * *

In case you're wondering how my friends in Christchurch fared, everyone is fine. Sean tells me that the damage was mostly not as bad as the media portrayed, and most Kiwis just looked at it as preparation for "the big one." I thought 7.2 on the Richter scale was pretty big, but I guess in the en zed it's only big if it's an 8 or higher, lol.

By the numbers, part II

Since I'm now 12 weeks in (one quarter of the way through!) to my RTW trip (and since it was requested), I figured it was time for more stats. If you missed part one, you can find it here.

* Ridden on a motorcycle in two countries (Athens and India)
* 1 pickpocket scare (just a scare - the guy behind me was very close behind me, shuffling with his money, and I thought he was going after mine - I checked, though, and all was good)
* 20 nights paid accommodations
* 9 countries and 6 different currencies
* I've learned how to say "go away" in one language (jao, it's Hindi and it rhymes with how)
* 2 random meetings of people I'd met in other places (1st: I ran into a guy I met at the airport in Dubai in Mumbai - a city of 20 million, how is that even possible?! 2nd: I ran into Miguel from Khaj in Agra.)
* 3 offers by strangers for me to stay with them (Do you remember all of them? The last two are recent, so you probably do.)
* 2580 pages read (4 novels, plus 45 pages or so into the 5th)
* 1 bus accident
* Met people from 29 different countries (Should I list them all?)
* 11 flights taken, who even knows how many countless trains, buses, taxis, metro, and rickshaw rides
* 8 CS hosts
* 1080 pictures taken, but probably more by the time this posts
* Longest train ride: 29 hours
* Longest bus ride: 12 hours
* 0 major itinerary changes in India, although there were a couple of places I stayed a day longer because I couldn't get the train or bus that I wanted
* Visited 8 cities in 4 different countries that weren't on my original itinerary

My pictures in others' places

All of the pictures that I upload to Flickr are viewable by the general public and have a Creative Commons license. Essentially this just means that people can use my pictures as long as they give me credit.

I have about 800 pictures in my collection - really not a lot compared to people who take loads of pictures everyday in their "real" life, and not just when they're traveling like I do - but my pictures are being used in other places now, too, and that's pretty neat.

All of my Burj Dubai shots have been favorited by the Burj Dubai's Flickr page. This is no real accolade as they've favorited about 11,000 other pictures, too. But hey, mine are some of them. Favoriting a picture is different from using a picture with a Creative Commons license, but I'm counting it here because the whole reason the Burj Dubai even has a Flickr page is for marketing.

But cooler than that is that one of my pictures taken at Prague's Old Town Square is being used in a Schmap city guide. (My shot is the first one, upper left.) As it happens, the picture is one of my personal faves, so I'm glad someone else liked it, too. I'm not at all trying to say how awesome I am or how great my pictures are, but it's cool knowing that complete strangers are seeing them and enjoying them.

Shots of me

Yesterday the weather was actually pretty decent in Prague. I woke up to rain, but the sun came out soon enough and it wasn't too cold. Elin, the Swedish couchsurfer who's been staying with the same host as me, was leaving for Rome (on a 20 hour train ride - yowza!) and hadn't really done any sightseeing. And I still hadn't seen Prague Castle so we set out together to see it.
I haven't really shared a lot of pics of me here, so I chose some of my recent favorites. You can see the latest Prague uploads on my Flickr page, of course.

Prague in pictures

I'm sorry for the lack of posting over the last couple of days. It's been a combination of really terrible internet connection speeds and super cold weather that has kept me indoors. I will post more later as I have a change of itinerary to share as well as a link to more Prague pictures. But these are my favorites so far.

Update: All of my Prague pictures have been uploaded now. Check em out here.

Hostel life

In some ways, being in a hostel with a bunch of people from all over the world can be interesting. It's cool that you never know who you'll meet or what kind of conversations you'll have. For instance, last night I was chatting briefly with the guy at the computer next to me. We were both ecstatic about free internet. :-) The conversation turned toward food (and getting some of it) and we decided to go to the market to get stuff to prepare back at the hostel. Another guy that I'd met earlier in the day wanted in, too, so we were off. The grocery store was interesting. We'd decided on the walk that we were gonna do pasta, but somehow we were still in the store for more than an hour. A big part of that time was trying to figure out what things were. Do you think this is cream? What kind of meat is this exactly? It looks like this could be butter, but it feels too hard to be butter. And so on. It was fun actually.

We got back to the hostel and wanted to put stuff in our rooms before we started cooking so we head upstairs. Huh, that's weird. We're both on the 5th floor. Huh, also weird - we're in the same room on the 5th floor. Even weirder, we're on the same bunk (I have the bottom) in the same room on the same floor. Crazy coincidence, right?

Anyway, we cooked, ate, and chatted together for awhile. He even shared his absinthe with me. (I don't recommend it!) We are both traveling alone so today we are going to go exploring together. It will be fun to have someone to sightsee with since I've mostly been doing that on my own.

This was an example of the good hostel life. On the flip side of that is: waking up to boys doing shots of Jaegermeister at 9am; loud Australians pounding through the room on their way to check out; random middle of the night farts; etc, etc. It hasn't been bad, though. Having had no experience with hostels prior to setting off on my trip, I'd say it's been positive overall.

Adjustment

The adjustment to Prague has been more difficult than I was expecting, I think. I actually had a hard time walking away from the hostel this morning and setting off. For some reason, checking the maps ahead of time had me on edge. The street names and place names are unpronounceable for me.

I finally just decided that this is how it's going to be sometimes and the only way around it is to just start walking. So I did. My first priority was to find something to wear under my skirt because it's still pretty cold here. (Although the rain that greeted me yesterday has mostly moved on, the sun is still only so warm.) Well, actually, the first priority was a bank so I could get some Czech crowns; then the warmer clothes.

I ended up at the Charles Bridge which is the destination in Prague, probably the place people are most familiar with. I wandered around some more and ended up at a church - but I still don't know what church it was. I only really went in to get out of the cold, but it was pretty amazing in there. After awhile I decided I should probably head back because I wasn't sure how long of a walk it was and I was getting pretty hungry. I didn't consult the map once, I just kind of walked in the direction that I thought I'd come from. It's not too hard to do that in Prague because there are a good number of distinctive landmarks, the castle being the one that I knew I wanted to walk away from to get back near the hostel.

For food I wanted something warming, filling, and traditional. I picked a place and ordered roast pork with bacon dumplings and spinach. And a beer, of course. It was yummy good. But it brings up for me the other reasons why adjustment has been a little harder.

For one, currency conversion isn't as easy to do in your head. With euros, you multiple by one and a half and you get dollars. With crowns, you divide by 17 to get dollars. So my lunch was 133 crowns, which might sound like a lot, but that's less than $10. (As an aside, I had to buy contact lens solution that cost more than my lunch - 250 crowns - which when converted to dollars makes it the most expensive contact solution I've ever bought!)

The other adjustment difficulty is language which makes sense since Czech doesn't seem to have an abundance of vowels laying around. On top of that, how many times do you think I've started to speak Spanish before realizing that I'm not in Barcelona anymore? I'll tell you. A lot. Grrr. I know that dobry den means hello, prosim (pronounced pro-seem) means please, and dekuji (pronounced kind of like ya-key) means thank you. And I kind of surprised myself when I told the waiter ucet ('oo' like in zoo chet) prosim and he knew exactly what I meant. On the other hand, I think that more people speak English here than they did in Barcelona and that's quite the relief.

In case you were wondering, I do have pictures to share, but it will have to wait. There are eight computers for internet use at the hostel (5 working), but the two that I've tried so far today don't seem to want to download my pictures from my camera.